How to get the most from Tegile and Oracle dNFS

Posted on June 11, 2015 by John Mastrolia | Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer

Direct NFS (dNFS), something introduced in Oracle 11g, is a feature that we like at Tegile.

Unfortunately not all flash-based vendors like it. Unlike those vendors, our arrays support native multiprotocol access, including NFSv3 and NFSv4. (Tegile arrays also support iSCSI, and Fiber Channel, and CIFS/SMB. As we like to say, “think AND not OR.”)

dNFS is baked in, like Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) for DAS or SAN environments; so databases can bypass the operating system to generate exactly the requests they need. dNFS also conserves memory: data is cached just once in user space, eliminating the duplicate in kernel memory, and eliminating the copy operation between kernel space and user space. Using load balancing across multiple network paths, if available, it also increases performance. Because dNFS is implemented in the database kernel, it enables platforms that do not support NFS natively, like Windows, to benefit from advanced dNFS functionality.

After playing with dNFS, we created an Oracle dNFS configuration guide for DBAs and System Administrators.

In summary, here are some of the sweet benefits of using Oracle dNFS on Tegile arrays:

Tegile arrays are asymmetric active/active so all available paths on both controllers can be used by the dNFS client, for both high availability and load balancing across multiple storage paths.

Tegile is Oracle Certified. For Oracle Database 12c, both single-instance and RAC certifications were achieved via NFS protocol, and were dNFS enabled.

As mentioned, Tegile arrays already support all protocols that you may already have. This means no workarounds and no hidden costs.